Vanished by Joseph Finder

by Joseph FinderSeries:Nick Heller, #1
Hardcover, 384 pg.
St. Martin’s Press, 2009
Read: April 7 – 8, 2015
I lost sleep over this one. Literally. I had to force myself to put this thing down so I could get a little shut-eye. Which wasn’t easy. After about 70 pages or so, I realized two things very clearly: I was hooked on this book and was going to have to get the next one in the series very soon. Neither feeling went away.

Last year, when I read FaceOff, the Jack Reacher/Nick Heller story was probably my favorite, so when I found myself wandering the library last week, with every thing on my “to get list” unavailable, I figured I’d finally give a full-length Heller story a try. Clearly, one of the better moves I’ve made.

Nick Heller is former Army Special Ops, turned corporate espionage hotshot. His estranged brother, Roger, is abducted (at best) leaving an injured wife behind. His nephew, Gabe, freaks out and calls his uncle for help, not willing to trust the police. So Nick, with “a very particular set of skills,” starts looking for his brother.

Heller’s similar to Reacher, but has more of a cerebral approach to things. I’m not sure that’s necessarily fair, maybe it’s that he takes a less direct approach to Reacher’s bull in a china shop approach. That’s not quite it, either. There’s something similar, yet very distinctive about their approaches. It’s more than just the fact that Heller has money and resources (and friends and family . . . ), while Reacher has a fresh set of clothes, a new toothbrush and whatever weapon he can take off a foe. Heller definitely has a better sense of humor — and a cell phone, maybe that’s it.

Heller definitely has to work — suffers some real investigative setbacks, is flat-out wrong on several fronts, blunders a bit, and has to go through some real emotional hardship. Making him human enough to really engage the reader (in a way that Reacher never can — not that I want to keep comparing the two).

Well paced, intelligent, some cool spycraft, some good fight scenes and a lot less gunplay than you’d expect — this is a thriller well worth your time.